The use of instant messaging, particularly in connection with mobile computing devices such as smart phones, has risen in popularity recently. Unsolicited messages, also referred to as messaging spam or “spim”, have also become commonplace, being generated and sent automatically by malicious messaging clients on servers or compromised home computers or smart phones (e.g. botnets). Such messages lead to undesirable wasting of computational resources of instant messaging providers as well as their client devices.
Some established spam-detection methodologies are difficult to apply to instant messaging spam, particularly in instant messaging networks that provide end-to-end encryption which prevents the inspection of message content and the application of techniques such as Bayesian filtering. As a result, current approaches to messaging spam detection may be ineffective, make inefficient use of computational resources, or both.